founders Programme

Hone your leadership skills and learn how to build your founding team.

We'll be covering:
- What makes an incredible startup leader?
- Putting yourself forward into a position of trust as a startup leader.
- Your communication and the psychology behind building incredible relationships.
- How your leadership impacts your "personal brand" and how your personal brand impacts your startup.
- Practical presenting, public speaking, and networking.
- AI and the future of business: How to utilise it to focus on what you're good at.
- Talks from inspirational underrepresented founders and speakers.

Develop your sales and marketing pipeline practically to build your revenue, tailored to each individual and types of business.

We'll be covering:
- Mapping out stakeholders and positioning your product to them.
- Getting the narrative right and making it as useful as possible to improve leads and conversions.
- Building your funnel (practically).
- Practical B2B and B2C focused workshops (where relevant for you) - everything from scraping lists, to doing the selling, or building the brand.
- Leveraging AI tools to reduce time and improve impact in your customer development process.
- The numbers: What do "healthy" financial numbers, that are at the level investors needs to see, actually mean and look like. How do you conduct your planning and early customer acquisition to reflect this?
- Talks from inspirational underrepresented founders and speakers.

Develop investment knowledge and investor relations skills.

We'll be covering:
- An introduction to all things “Startup Investor”: What investors care about at this stage.
- How raising from Angels actually works; how raising from VCs actually works (in their own words).
- The different kinds of pitch decks you need, when, why, and how they differ.
- The UK's landscape currently and how this impacts your fundraise. How to use this as an opportunity and overcome the challenges this poses.
- LOTS of pitching practice and feedback.
- Talks from inspirational underrepresented founders and speakers.

We have 2 online sessions per week, in the evenings, to expand on what we learned during our in-person days.

This includes:
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- Online sessions on greater pitching, fundraising logistics, the operational elements behind fundraising and preparing for investment, some team building, more skills building, and more.
- Talks from inspiring successful underrepresented founders.
- 1:1 Coaching sessions.
- Legal and Investor Office Hours.
- Support while you do your own work, focusing on building your income and investor network on your own during the course of the programme.
- A pitching practice day to prepare for the showcase.

Improving your startup’s visibility by marketing you and your startup through our channels, and finishing the programme by pitching your startup in front of a curated group of investors and community partners.